The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (31 page)

The Outlaw would surrender, throw down his guns, and give himself up. In the comic, Rangergirl had lowered her own weapon, confused. She’d expected things to end in a gunfight, after all, and instead the Outlaw was smiling and saying she’d won. Rangergirl escorted the company of Wild Rangers who took the Outlaw into custody, and she watched as the sorcerer was locked up. She knew it was a trick, but what choice did she have? The Outlaw had surrendered. She couldn’t very well gun him down after that, could she? Rangergirl was a force for law, justice, order, mercy—everything the Outlaw was not. She had to play by the rules.

That first night in jail, the Outlaw’s gang—a razor-wielding polyglot orangutan with a human brain, a mad scientific rainmaker, a woman with snake venom for blood—had busted their leader out, and killed all the Rangers. The Outlaw was no match for Rangergirl, and would have died in a showdown, so he’d surrendered instead, knowing Rangergirl wouldn’t shoot, knowing no jail cell was secure enough to prevent his escape. Since then, Rangergirl had been trying to pursue the Outlaw into a situation where surrender wasn’t an option.

Marzi was sure the Outlaw would pull that same trick again today, anticipating a similar result, sure that Marzi would escort him back to Genius Loci and lock him up again. Of
course
that would happen—the story demanded it.

But Marzi had other plans.

She
wasn’t
Rangergirl. Marzi wasn’t a hero, and she didn’t have to play by a hero’s rules. She was just Marzi, and even if she had trouble living with herself later, she would do what she had to; what Rangergirl was too honorable to do in the same situation.

“Mount up,” she said, and the four of them got out of the car.

As soon as they stepped into the trees, their Western clothes and weapons returned, as substantial as they’d been beyond the door. Marzi stopped and turned to face her friends. “This is it. Your last chance to back out—”

“C’mon, Marzi,” Lindsay said, rolling her eyes. “I don’t think this is necessary.”

“True,” Ray said, checking to make sure his rifle was loaded.

Jonathan just nodded. There was a smudge of cream cheese on his chin. Marzi wondered if he was going to die like that.

“Good enough,” Marzi said. She led them into the clearing, guns drawn and ready.

The Outlaw leaned against the side of Jane’s mud-spattered car. The god looked like a grizzled character actor, all rotten teeth and menace, and the only trace of the supernatural left in the Outlaw was that long shadow, stretching out on the ground despite the high noonday sun. Marzi was gratified to see how human her enemy looked, how mortal. The Outlaw in her comic was a wily, long-lived sorcerer, but he
could
die, unlike an immortal spirit of destruction. Now the thing with the wasteland face
was
the Outlaw, and therefore mortal.

Jane, however, was no longer human at all: She was a multi-armed mud-monster with a ghost white clay face. She stood at the Outlaw’s side, like a loyal attack dog. Denis stood on the Outlaw’s other side, near the car’s open hatchback, keeping himself a little apart, looking miserable and holding a bottle with a rag stuck in the top. Beej had said Denis didn’t want to be here, and looking at him, Marzi believed it.

“So,” she said, her gun pointed at the Outlaw. “Here we are.”

“Yup,” the Outlaw said, and spat. It grinned at her. “Guess you had to kill Beej to get out of the canyon.”

“No,” Marzi said. “He betrayed you.”

The Outlaw sighed. “It’s so hard to get decent help nowadays. I bet you didn’t even reward him with a roll in the hay, poor bastard. Oh, well.” The Outlaw tipped its ugly hat to Ray. “Garamond. I see a young hotshot came and took your badge away.”

“No, friend,” Ray said. “I passed it on. I’m just a deputy now.”

“Moving down in the world. How nice. I see you got your mail-order cowboy back, too, Marzi. I’m impressed.”

“Are we gonna jaw or slap leather?” Marzi said. It was exactly what Rangergirl said in issue number five. “I’m calling you out for the deaths you’ve caused.”

The Outlaw looked at her for a long moment, and Marzi pushed with her mind, her imagination, exerting the full weight of her narrative imperative on the god.

“Reckon you found your fat manager’s body, then,” the Outlaw said. “And heard about the wild rumpus we threw downtown. We’ve killed lots of folks today, and I ain’t hit my limit yet. I suppose I’ve got a lot to pay for.” The last sentence was what the Outlaw said in the comic, and Marzi suppressed a grin. This was going to work.

“I reckon I know when I’m outgunned,” the Outlaw said meditatively. “Drop your weapons, boys.” The god slowly took his long-barreled Colt .45 Warmakers from their holsters and tossed them at Marzi’s feet. Denis gently set down his bottle, and Jane crossed all six of her arms.

“Pick up his guns,” Marzi said to her friends, and Jonathan did so.

The Outlaw stepped forward, hands outspread. “I give myself up, Rangergirl. Let’s start the rehabilitation process.”

Marzi still had her gun pointed at the god. This was the point where fiction and reality would diverge, where it would become clear that life didn’t imitate art, that this wasn’t a comic book.

In the largely fictional code of the West, there was only one thing worse than shooting an armed man in the back . . . and that was shooting an unarmed man in the face.

That was exactly what Marzi intended to do.

Rangergirl would never do something so cowardly. Such an act would have violated everything she believed in, everything she stood for.

But Marzi wasn’t Rangergirl, and she didn’t have to play by Rangergirl’s rules. She tightened her finger on the trigger.

Then she hesitated. Not out of mercy, but because a terrible thought had suddenly occurred to her. If she wasn’t Rangergirl—more accurately, if she
stopped being
Rangergirl—would her enemy stop being the Outlaw? If she violated the laws of her own narrative, if she broke with her character so fundamentally, wouldn’t that break
everything,
the whole elaborate framework that constrained the thing with the wasteland face? What if Marzi was about to set her enemy free, let it throw off the bounds of Marzi’s Old West perceptions and become its true self, unencumbered, immaterial, unstoppable?

Marzi saw the Outlaw’s smirk, and knew she was right—moreover, she knew that
the Outlaw
knew, that he had antici-pated her plan and played along without resistance, knowing one dishonorable bullet from her would set him free.

She lowered her gun.

“Ah, fuck,” the Outlaw said. “Well, plan B, then.” He turned and hurried back to the car, and Jane stepped in front of her god, a living shield. She spread out her arms, and claws popped from her fingertips.

“Burn them, Denis!” the Outlaw shouted.

Marzi looked at Denis—and saw another possibility. In planning future plotlines for her comic, she’d had the idea of making the Outlaw’s razor-wielding orangutan turn on his master; wouldn’t Denis serve that function just as well? After all, outlaws weren’t exclusively killed in showdowns. Some-times they were betrayed, murdered by their own disgruntled henchmen, and Beej said that Denis had been recruited against his will. But Marzi couldn’t just imagine a razor into Denis’s hand—pure illusion wouldn’t be enough to kill the Outlaw. For a weapon to kill the god, it had to have some spine of reality, even something as objectively harmless as Marzi’s toy pistol.

Then she saw Denis drawing a butcher knife, a
real
knife, from his waistband. She stared at him, even as Jane roared and started toward them, Lindsay firing uselessly into Jane’s clay body with the tommy gun. The Outlaw was grinning—he
loved
killing, he
loved
gunfire. Marzi watched Denis step forward, his face twisted with hate, and she thought,
Am I making him do this, or is he doing it on his own?

Denis stabbed the Outlaw in the back, between the shoulder blades, then pulled out the knife and stabbed again, and again, hitting three times as the Outlaw fell, mouth open, expression stupid and stunned. Marzi wondered if the god had ever felt pain before, real physical pain, and she suspected not. Marzi concentrated hard on keeping the Outlaw mortal, and he fell, facedown. His long shadow snapped back into his body like a broken rubber band, and still Denis drove the knife down, kneeling on the Outlaw’s back, ramming the blade in seven, eight, nine times. Then he stopped abruptly, as if deciding the Outlaw was finally dead enough. He remained kneeling on the god’s back, his head hanging down, his breath ragged and loud.

Marzi turned, no time for relief, because Jane was still coming at them. Jonathan and Lindsay had stepped in front of Marzi, and they were shooting at Jane, but the bullets passed through her body, barely slowing her. Ray, standing back, fired one careful shot after another at Jane’s head, but while chunks of clay flew away with each bullet, she didn’t slow.

Then an engine growled, and a huge motorcycle roared into the clearing. Alice Belle was riding it, a Valkyrie in black leather and sunglasses, howling, whirling lit firepots on chains over her head with one hand, steering her bike with the other. Alice flung the firepots like a bolo, and they whirled straight for Jane, striking her near the throat. The chains wound around Jane’s neck and spiraled down her body, severing her head, slicing through her arms, and then Alice’s motorcycle struck Jane’s falling body and drove
over
her, tires churning her into a pile of mud. The motorcycle stopped, miraculously still upright, and Alice cut the engine. The sudden silence was resounding.

“That was . . . improbable,” Ray said. “The cavalry riding in.”

“Damn, baby,” Alice said to Lindsay. “That bitch nearly had you.”

Lindsay dropped her tommy gun, which dissolved before it hit the ground. The medicine here was broken, the magic fading, and their old clothes were coming back. Jane was just mud, and Marzi supposed Jane was dying even before Alice stopped her—otherwise, she’d be re-forming now.

The Outlaw was still solid, though. Marzi had made him so mortal that he even left a corpse behind.

Lindsay ran to Alice, arms outstretched . . . and then Alice dissolved, faded into dust motes and airy spaces, her motorcycle ghosting away into nothing, until both bike and rider were entirely gone.

Lindsay stopped. “Alice? Alice!”

“She wasn’t real,” Ray said. “She was real
enough,
she was the cavalry, but Marzi made her.”

“Not me,” Marzi said. “I didn’t. But Lindsay’s an artist, too.”

“I really believed she’d come back,” Lindsay said, sitting on the ground, near where Alice had been. “That she’d come and save me.”

“Good,” Ray said. “If you hadn’t really believed it, she wouldn’t have.”

“God,” Lindsay said. “I miss her.”

“I know,” Marzi said.

Jonathan dropped his guns, and they vanished, too. “Now what? Are we done?”

“Almost. We should bury the Outlaw.”

Denis stood up unsteadily and kicked the Outlaw in the head. Marzi winced.
Denis
wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot the Outlaw in the face. “Don’t bury him,” Denis said. “Let the animals have him.”

“No,” Ray said. “Better to bury him. I’m sure his meat’s poison, anyway. Do we have anything to dig with?”

“I’ve got a bucket in my car,” Lindsay said.

“We could probably dig a grave in that heap of mud over there,” Jonathan said. “It looks pretty soft.”

“No!” Denis shouted. “Leave the mud alone!” He snatched up the butcher knife and brandished it at them.

They all stared at him, and he lowered the knife. “Shit.” He looked away. “Do what you want. You could at least thank me. I saved your lives.”

Marzi thought about it. Maybe she hadn’t made Denis stab the Outlaw with the force of her narrative will. Maybe he’d done it on his own. She’d never know for sure. “Thanks,” she said.

Denis grunted.

They dug into the drying mud, everyone taking turns except Denis, who sat by Jane’s car, staring at the dirt. Lindsay, Marzi, and Jonathan were all sitting together on the ground, not talking, while Ray took his turn digging with the bucket.

“Uh, guys?” Ray said. “There’s already somebody buried here. A woman.”

Denis said “Fuck,” loudly, distinctly, and nine times in a row.

Wallow in Velvet

“So Denis is in jail,” Lindsay said, shaking her head. “Think he’ll wind up in prison?” She sat on the couch beneath the bay window in Genius Loci, a week after the Outlaw’s death. Bobby-O was behind the counter, trying to look cool, though Marzi knew he was terrified about his new position as night manager. The café owners had called from Florida and offered Marzi the job of day manager, and she’d accepted, deciding it might be nice to have her nights free for a while. Once Bobby-O was more secure in his position, they could trade off, if Marzi found that she missed nights. On her first day in Hendrix’s old job, Marzi had blasted death metal all day long. It wasn’t much of a memorial, but it was the best she could do.

“Maybe they’ll put him in a mental hospital,” Marzi said. Denis had confessed to burying Jane in a pile of mud, though the cops couldn’t make much sense of his story, which involved ghosts and gods. He’d also confessed to the murder of an unidentified elderly cowboy, but he denied having killed Hendrix, claiming his friend Beej had done that. The police were looking for Beej anyway, since he’d escaped from jail on the same day that half a dozen cops were murdered and a group of mostly unknown terrorists blew up the clock tower and did significant damage to other local landmarks. The police understandably suspected Beej, and they knew Denis was involved—there were witnesses who’d seen him lob a firebomb. Marzi was worried about the investigation, of course, but she thought it would be okay. When the police did an autopsy on the Outlaw, he would be as human inside as anyone. She’d imagined him well enough for that. And if Denis had said anything about Marzi and her friends, the cops hadn’t taken it seriously enough to follow up—Lindsay’s friend Joey had enough inside information to let them know that. The police had questioned Marzi again about the night Denis and Beej and Jane tried to break into the café, but that was all the contact they’d had. Marzi wondered what story the cops would make up to explain everything. It would have to be pretty baroque, but she had faith in their ability to rationalize chaos.

Things had been ugly. Downtown and much of West Cliff Drive were wrecked, but it could have been much worse, and the townspeople were already rebuilding.

Everything was over, now. The door to the medicine lands was gone as if it had never been, and Ray’s original mural was back. Marzi’s cap gun was just a toy again, and she’d hung it up on the wall behind the counter in the café. Yesterday Marzi found the old man who’d sold her the gun in the first place, and she told him he could have free coffee at Genius Loci for the rest of his life. He’d nodded, as if such things were offered to him every day, and thanked her. Marzi hadn’t heard from the scorpion oracle, but thought she wasn’t the kind of creature that would bother with thanks—she’d expected Marzi to do her job, and Marzi had, and that was the end of their association.

Marzi sat snuggled deep in a velvet chair, a pint of Guinness in her hands. Ray sat at the far end of the couch, holding forth to Jonathan about his days in New York. Jonathan was taking notes.

“You and Jonathan have a nice time last night?” Lindsay waggled her eyebrows. She was back to normal, too, though there was a streak of melancholy in her still. Alice hadn’t returned from wherever she’d gone.

The first few nights after the Outlaw’s death, Lindsay, Marzi, and Jonathan had all stayed together, hesitant to be by themselves. Last night Lindsay had left them alone, saying she needed some time by herself to feel blue without bringing anyone else down. Marzi and Jonathan had finally had time together, to talk. His memories of his experiences beyond the Western Door were fading, and losing their horrible potency, and the distance between them was beginning to shrink. Things were still fragile, but after their time together talking last night she had hopes that, by the end of the summer, she and Jonathan could at least get back to the place they’d been when all this began—with possibilities stretched out ahead of them.

Ray, meanwhile, had spent every night with the avowed intention of “getting laid or getting drunk trying.” Marzi didn’t know if he’d succeeded in the former, but supposed he’d managed the latter. He even had some speaking engagements scheduled, and was honing a story about “travels in the desert” to explain his long absence. Ray was enjoying the real world—and after The Oasis, who wouldn’t?

Lindsay nudged her. “Hello? Earth to Marzipan? Where are my sordid details?”

“Sorry,” Marzi said. “My thoughts have been getting away with me lately. Yeah, last night was nice. He’s still a little freaked out by the fact that we’ve been inside his soul . . .” She shook her head.

“He’ll get past that,” Lindsay said seriously, lowering her voice. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it was a weird and not very pleasant experience, but I think it’s also partly an excuse for him to keep his distance. We’ve been through a lot these past few days. We all need some time to unwind.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Marzi said. “And we might have more time. Jonathan is thinking about moving out here for a while, after he finishes his thesis defense. He wants to write a book about Ray, and Ray’s agreed to let him.”

Lindsay nodded. “You see? It’s not all collapsing buildings and scorpion bites.”

“Scorpions sting, they don’t bite,” Marzi said. “I don’t even think they have teeth.”

“Then how do they chew their food?” Lindsay asked. She grinned.

A motorcycle roared up outside, hardly an uncommon sound; bikers liked Genius Loci. Then a familiar voice said, “Lindsay?”

Alice Belle stood by the door, dressed in riding leathers, holding her helmet in one hand.

Lindsay looked at her for a long moment. “Are you real?” she said.

Alice cocked her head. “Last time I checked, yeah.” Her eyes darted to Jonathan and Ray, back to Lindsay. “You know that . . . problem I was having? It cleared up. I’m not having those, ah, urges anymore. I don’t want to do anything right now except sit and have a beer with you. I’m afraid that feeling will come back, but—”

“Don’t,” Lindsay said, springing from her chair. “Don’t worry. It won’t. I have a
lot
to tell you. Let’s get you a beer. You’ll need it.” She led Alice toward the counter, shooting Marzi a grin over her shoulder.

Marzi settled back more deeply into the chair. Yes. It could have been worse. That was hardly an inspiring sentiment, but sometimes harsh optimism was the best you could do in the desert.

She’d decided to keep
Rangergirl
going—at the very least, the character deserved a good ending, rather than an abrupt termination. Marzi’s best work was probably ahead of her anyway. In a year or two, she could do a different comic, something about connections rather than lonely wandering, something about love, and getting through the long nights. Ray had suggested they collaborate, which was an intriguing notion—associating her name with his would be a good career move, too, with publicity swirling around him because of his reappearance. He’d only been a minor figure in the art scene, but it was amazing what a miraculous resurrection could do for your image.

Marzi didn’t know what was going to happen, but there were doors opening before her, and none of them led into the dead heart of the desert. Compared to the lonely desolation of her life before, every step she took now seemed to lead along a path strewn with flowers.

Marzi moved to the couch and settled down beside Jonathan, and listened to Ray talk about punching Andy Warhol in the face in Manhattan in the seventies.

It was probably bullshit, but it was a good story.